Adopting Agility: The Journey towards Success in Product Maintenance

Being a product based ERP solution which is available in 60 different countries through its 79 different offices worldwide, IFS faced a major challenge with regard to providing agility among product maintenance teams within the organization.

A matured well defined product support process was already in place due to the fact that the application is used by 500,000+ users among 2000 customers worldwide using 20 different languages and it was clearly evident that there was a high risk related to making changes to this process. There were two major challenges identified in this set up.

Neither a SCRUM nor a SCRUMBAN based approach was suitable due to the dynamic nature of work within “full-fledged” maintenance teams.

Even if we came up with a uniquely different approach to find a better process, can we measure the success of this through metrics? If so how?

Outline/structure of the Session

This presentation will try to elaborate on the approach that was taken (hybrid of SCRUM, Kanban, and Lean – only focusing on some key concepts), how we achieved success and how it was validated with the use of Agile / Lean Metrics.

This will be a presentation with interaction with the audience facilitating questions during the presentation.

Learning Outcome

Agile, lean thinking and how it can be used together with Kanban for visualization and the practical usage of WIP limits. How we can think differently with an agile mindset.

Target Audience

People who are interested in adopting agile in services organizations or in product maintenance teams

This approach is a combination of Lean, Kanban & SCRUM. For example the concept of having a common vision through visualizing things using Work Flow Boards and the introduction of WIP limits which comes from Kanban together with trying to eliminate waste (Software waste) which comes from Lean thinking (e.g. Extra features, task switching, handoffs, partially done work etc.) in addition to some aspects of SCRUM (daily standups, retrospective meetings and how to plan things in a highly dynamic nature of work due to different priorities of bug inflow)

Please do let me know if you need further clarifications on this. Probably to clarify further I might have to explain the context and the nature of work.

Yes, Definitely it will be discussed during this presentation (this the section that is mentioned under number 2. "Even if we came up with a uniquely different approach to find a better process, can we measure the success of this through metrics? If so how?" )

Hello Hiruna, Thank you for your interest in Agile India 2017. The slide deck that you have attached has good amount of information on Retrospectives, their format and other details. Would it be possible to cut short the general content around retrospectives and elaborate on the Product Maintenance journey that is the core topic for your talk? Thank you.

According to Vivek's request I added these slides on the retrospectives which was from one of my previous presentations and this is NOT the one that I intent to present in this conference. When it comes to this topic I have not yet prepared my slides since my proposal is not yet accepted. Do you expect speakers to do all the preparations (including the preparation of slides) for the topic?